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January 30, 2009
"Education is very central to our democracy. You can neglect it, you can get it on the cheap, and you get what you pay for. And if you think education is costly, try ignorance. Because that will be far costlier."-- Vartan Gregorian
Last fall, Vartan Gregorian convened a group of educators to urge whoever would become our next president to invest in higher education. Their meeting later resulted in a two-page newspaper ad, an open letter to then president-elect Obama asking that whatever economic stimulus package comes out of Washington, five percent of it — around 40 to 45 billion dollars — go to higher public education. The administration appears to have heard their plea. The economic stimulus plan that Congress has been voting on contains $150 billion in new federal spending for education from nursery school through college, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.
Of course, the spending allocations are not yet in place — and some of the contentious debate over the bill is over whether funding education is a stimulus or just an expenditure. Vartan Gregorian talked with Bill Moyers about the perilous economic state that higher education institutions and students find themselves in today.
>More on Crunching College Costs.
Vartan Gregorian
Vartan Gregorian is the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911. Prior to his current position, which he assumed in June 1997, Gregorian served for nine years as the sixteenth president of Brown and, for eight years, Gregorian served as a president of the New York Public Library.
He was born in Tabriz, Iran, of Armenian parents, receiving his elementary education in Iran and his secondary education in Lebanon. In 1956 he entered Stanford University, where he majored in history and the humanities, graduating with honors in 1958. He was awarded a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964.
Gregorian has taught European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of THE ROAD TO HOME: MY LIFE AND TIMES, ISLAM: A MOSAIC, NOT A MONOLITH, AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN, 1880-1946.
In 1986, Gregorian was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and in 1989 the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Service to the Arts. In 1998, President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In 2004, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award.
In 1988 Bill Moyers talked with Vartan Gregorian about education and information at the cusp of the information age for the series A WORLD OF IDEAS.
>Watch that interview in its entirety.
Published January 30, 2009.
Photo by Robin Holland.
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